Collecting, Painting, and playing games with transforming toys such as Transformers , Gobots , Machine Men, etc

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Steamhammer Power Core Combiner paint scheme design

this is an idea roughly of the original paint scheme

fluro green, blue, orange, yellow, white and green

Basic concept of a new unified paint scheme:

golds, reds, blacks, greys.

So I should be getting Steamhammer, a Power Core Combiner Transformer, in the mail, hopefully tomorrow or the next day. It will be my first paint test of a more modern Transformer toy. The Power Core Combiners consist of a Transformer, (scout class size - 4 to 5 inches tall in robot mode I think). The Transformer is a Drone Commander, and with him comes 4 drones. The drones look like human vehicles, but are not Transformers - they have no robot mode. Instead, they are remote weapons under the control of the Transformer commander. When the Transformer is in trouble, he can call in the drones, and they attach to him, to form a combined 'power suit' kind of mode. It's like when the Constructicons come and connect together to form the giant Devastator form, but smaller, and the commander is the only actual Transformer.

Anway, the Power Core Combiners are designed so that drones from any box set are able to connect with Transformers from any box set, meaning the more Power Core Combiner sets you get, the more different types of combined modes you can have. Sounds like fun!

The down side - in typical 'it's just a toy for kids' fashion, the paint schemes are often kind of, well, terrible. And when randomly coloured drones connect to the Transformer, you're left with a sometimes visually jarring jumble of coloured body parts on the combined machine.

In Japan, they re-released the Power Core Combiners in matching paint schemes, so that the drones and their commander all matched colour wise, and when they combined, you would get a combined machine form that actually looked like it all went together. However, while they were all the same colour, they still didn't possess the sort of shading, panelling, highlighting, and so forth, that you get from hand painting miniatures.

So rather than buy expensive Japanese Power Core Combiner variants, I decided to fork out $28 and buy the standard version of Steamhammer and his drones, and I'm going to paint them up how I want. I found the instruction book for Steamhammer on the net, and I have simply coloured in the image of his combined form, to see what it might look like with all the drones and the Transformer in yellow and black :)